FYI, Trump's a Nazi now

Just a heads-up.

There’s a Holocaust happening in China today. The Uyghurs, an ethnic group that includes, or included, 11 million people in China, are being rounded up arbitrarily and sent to “re-education camps,” where they are often killed or forcibly sterilized. More than a million, we think, are in camps now.

I used to believe that if anything on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust were to start up today, the rest of the world would rapidly respond and put an end to it. As a kid, I imagined enlisting. But China is too strong. Our leaders get away with not responding, because China simply denies everything. Sometimes with only the thinnest veneer of plausibility, like when they claimed to end the involuntary harvesting of prisoners’ organs, but the number of organ transplants kept rising steadily.

Joe Biden is not responding appropriately to this atrocity out of pragmatism, cowardice, or weakness. Maybe Kamala Harris will be different; we can at least hope.

But this started in 2017. Donald Trump did not respond appropriately either, because he approves of China’s actions.

Here’s Trump’s National Security Advisor at the time:

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

His administration felt differently, but there wasn’t much they could do. Mike Pompeo officially condemned the Uyghur genocide on his last day as Secretary of State, now that Trump couldn’t fire him. They also got him to sign a bill (co-sponsored by Harris) that sanctioned some Chinese officials for the ongoing atrocity.

Since then, people working for Trump have continued to condemn the genocide, and made pledges in his name to end it if he’s elected. But Trump himself has, as far as I can find, still declined to. In 2022, interviewers asked him whether he agreed with his staff, and he responded “I’d rather not say at the moment.” During his 2024 campaign, he’s said that Xi would be his first call as President, but he would not include human rights in his agenda for the call—in fact, one of his demands would be for them to increase the number of state executions for nonviolent offenses.

This is a consistent principle of his. Here’s President Trump excusing the massacres of Kurds on the Turkish border (video):

Turkey, in all fairness, they’ve had a legitimate problem with [the border]. They had terrorists, they had a lot of people in there that they couldn’t have. They’ve suffered a lot of loss of lives also. And they had to have it cleaned out. But once you start that, it gets to be to the point where a tremendous amount of bad things can happen.

He’s going to try to do the same thing here in America.

Ever since being voted out of office, Trump’s language about immigration has shifted more and more towards the language of ethnic cleansing. He regularly tells crowds that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” There are about 15 or 16 million people here who shouldn’t be, he says, so “we got a lot of work to do.” More recently, he’s made it explicit that when he says “blood,” he means “genes.” It’s not a dog whistle, it’s not a gaffe, it’s not a malicious misreading of his ramblings.

This is identical to Nazi rhetoric. This is as harsh as Hitler was ever willing to be in his campaign speeches. He didn’t say he was going to round up the people poisoning his country’s blood and kill them. He said that he was going to deport them. Even once in power, when his government shifted policy toward extermination, they never admitted it.

A second Trump presidency will detain people suspected of being illegal immigrants, including those retroactively made “illegal,” and won’t be transparent about what happens next. How many of them survive detention will depend on logistics, on whether his new staff quietly rebels, and on how earnestly Trump tries to ensure that his preferred way of dealing with detainees is actually implemented. There are lots of ways this could end up not being a mass state murder. But “Trump disapproves of mass state murders” isn’t one of them.

(He wants pogroms, too. Here’s a video of him calling for one against thieves. Just put people in charge who will look the other way, he says, and the problem will be solved immediately.)

I don’t think Trump started his political career as a Nazi. In 2017, he famously tried to have it both ways, saying of a rally led by white supremacists and containing avowed Nazis that it included some “very fine people,” but that the Nazis of course should be “condemned totally.” I think he just didn’t care one way or the other, and so was calibrating his remarks so that anyone could persuade themselves he agreed with them. Doing the politician thing, except most politicians don’t do that when it’s Nazis.

But in office, Trump got to know, and came to respect, Xi, and Erdogan, and Putin. His own attempts at mass deportation and building a wall were largely ineffective. But those guys. They knew how to get things done.

And now, after four years out of office, he’s rhetorically committed to the idea that there are millions of people here who shouldn’t be, because of their evil natures and evil genes. Now, all he’s willing to say against Nazis is that he’s never read Mein Kampf.

His Republican Party is, I believe and hope, not a Nazi party. As an institution, it’s not what the Nazi party was in the 1930s, just badly off-kilter. But Trump himself is a Nazi now. He doesn’t call himself that. But then, the Nazis didn’t use that word for themselves either.

For most of the past four years, I’ve tuned him out. I thought I knew everything I needed to know about him. Maybe you have too. But we were wrong—something has changed. People have been crying wolf for so long about Republicans being Nazis that now we just tune it out. Newspapers scared of looking like tabloids resort to headlines about “a fascination with genes and bloodlines.” So I missed it, and most people are still missing it.

So like I said, this is an FYI. Do with it what you will. But if you’re okay with putting a Nazi in the White House, if you publicly work towards that goal, I will never trust a single word out of your mouth ever again.

Also, please, make a plan to vote.